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Sunday, October 12, 2008

too warm for October

I think it was in the high 70s today. That's too warm for this time of year. Regis says tomorrow will bring a cold, drenching rain. I bet I won't like that either.

We were at Tom and Betty's last night to see Michelle, and for great cooking, as usual. Tom made bistro chicken and a salad with candied pecans, pears, and shallots on greens. It was delicious. As usual.

I made chili and corn muffins today from an old issue of Cooking Light. Peter even liked it and he's turned up his nose at a lot of my cooking lately. The black bean and zucchini enchiladas the other day didn't tempt him for a second.

We started the day with a long walk and that was the most relaxing part of the day. We came home to start the laundry and clean. I put out some Halloween decorations, filled the bird feeders, exchanged the summer candles for fall scents, and sucked or wiped up the dust of at least a couple months. I used to tell my kids when they were little that they could write their names in the dust but not the year.

We're doing the last barbecue of the season next weekend and our old friends Jane and Dick are coming from Iowa. Regis is cooking up ribs, brisket, and a bunch of hot dogs. Tom said he'd bring beer can chicken. There should be a good variety of chow but it sounds like the weather won't be conducive to sitting outside. Ah well, this time of year, we open up the porch, use a little electric heater when the sun goes down, and it's very cozy.

Speaking of sitting, we made the winter commitment today and put our favorite lawn chairs on the shelf in the garage. It's almost like getting the snow blower tuned up....a sign of the season's change. Reggie calls my abandonment of sandals in the fall "making the shoe commitment". Ha!

I went through my shoes today and tried to be realistic about what I would wear and what I wouldn't. A whole bag ended up the car for the thrift store along with several boxes of junk and stuff. We're both pack rats and it's a constant battle to keep down the level of flotsam and jetsam. We just have too much stuff.

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Christmas in July

lights

My Livestrong family

Walking the trails

Winter Grace

If you have seen the snow under the lamppost piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table or somewhere slowly falling into the brook to be swallowed by water, then you have seen beauty and know it for its transience. And if you have gone out in the snow for only the pleasure of walking barely protected from the galaxies, the flakes settling on your parka like the dust from just-born stars, the cold waking you as if from long sleeping, then you can understand how, more often than not, truth is found in silence, how the natural world comes to you if you go out to meet it, its icy ditches filled with dead weeds, its vacant birdhouses, and dens full of the sleeping. But this is the slowed-down season held fast by darkness and if no one comes to keep you company then keep watch over; your own solitude. In that stillness, you will learn with your whole body the significance of cold and the night, which is otherwise always eluding you.

Portrait

Winter storm

Kermit and Hobbes

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice—though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. "Mend my life!" each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world determined to do the only thing you could do—determined to savethe only life you could save.

Permission Granted

You do not have to choose the bruised peachor misshapen pepper others pass over.You don't have to buryyour grandmother's keys underneathher camellia bush as the will states.

You don't need to write a poem aboutyour grandfather coughing up his lunginto that plastic tube—the machine's wheezingalmost masking the kvetching sistersin their Brooklyn kitchen.

You can let the crows amaze your sonwithout your translation of their cries.You can lie so long under thissummer shower your imprintwill be left when you rise.

You can be stupid and simple as a heifer.Cook plum and apple turnovers in the nude.Revel in the flight of birds withoutdreaming of flight. Remember the taste ofraw dough in your mouth as you edged a pie.

Feel the skin on things vibrate. Attuneyourself. Close your eyes. Hum.Each beat of the world's pulse demandsonly that you feel it. No thoughts.Just the single syllable: Yes ...

See the homeless woman followingthe tunings of a dead composer?She closes her eyes and swayswith the subways. Follow her down,inside, where the singing resides.

flush the heart’s red peony, then send it back without effort or thought.

And the trees breathe in what we exhale, clap their green hands

in gratitude, bend to the sky.

From Line Dance (Word Press, 2008).

Starfish by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up tothe store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you haveyour eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fishermandown beside you at the counter who says, Last nightthe channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to thepond, where whole generations of biologicalprocesses are boiling beneath the mud. Reedsspeak to you of the natural world: they whisper,they sing. And herons pass by. Are you oldenough to appreciate the moment? Too old?There is movement beneath the water, but itmay be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the years you ran around, the years you developeda shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you aregenuinely surprised to find how quiet you havebecome. And then life lets you go home to thinkabout all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the onewho never had any conditions, the one who waitedyou out. This is life's way of letting you know thatyou are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because youstopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for yourlate night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) Andthen life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,with smiles on their starry faces as they headout to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

Do Not Expect That If Your Book Falls Open

Dana Gioia

Do not expect that if your book falls opento a certain page, that any phraseyou read will make a difference today,or that the voices you might overhearwhen the wind moves through the yellow-greenand golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on thedark surface of the lake. Each afternoonyour shadow walks beside you on the wall,and the days stay long and heavy underneaththe distant rumor of the harvest. Onemore summer gone,and one way or another you survive,dull or regretful, never learning thatnothing is hidden in the obviouschanges of the world, that even the dimreflection of the sun on tall, dry grassis more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly thenyou touch, you see, you press againstthe surface of impenetrable things.

Riveted by Robyn Sarah

It is possible that things will not get better than they are now, or have been known to be. It is possible that we are past the middle now. It is possible that we have crossed the great water without knowing it, and stand now on the other side. Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now we are being given tickets, and they are not tickets to the show we had been thinking of, but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope. The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall without waiting for the last act: people do. Some people do. But it is probable that we will stay seated in our narrow seats all through the tedious dénouement to the unsurprising end — riveted, as it were; spellbound by our own imperfect lives because they are lives, and because they are ours.

"Riveted" by Robyn Sarah from A Day's Grace: Poems 1997-2002

I Was Always Leaving by Jean Nordhaus

I was always leaving, I wasabout to get up and go, I wason my way, not sure where.Somewhere else. Not here.Nothing here was good enough.

It would be better there, where Iwas going. Not sure how or why.The dome I cowered underwould be raised, and I would be releasedinto my true life. I would meet there

the ones I was destined to meet.They would make an opening for meamong the flutes and boulders,and I would be taken up. That thismight be a form of death

did not occur to me. I only knowthat something held me back,a doubt, a debt, a face I could notleave behind. When the doorfell open, I did not go through.

Bees by Jane Hirshfield

In every instant, two gates. One opens to fragrant paradise, one to hell.Mostly we go through neither.

Mostly we nod to our neighbor,lean down to pick up the paper,go back into the house.

But the faint cries—ecstasy? horror?Or did you think it the soundof distant bees,making only the thick honey of this good life?

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Celebrating!

Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself

Barbara Crooker

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trekacross the sky made me think about my life, the placesof brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where griefhas strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to goldfor a brief while, then lose it all each November.Through the cold months, they stand, take the worstweather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leavescome April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to findshelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.